Monday, July 10, 2017

Can Trump Use Fracking To Break Putin's Stranglehold On Eastern Europe?

Energy: Maybe you didn't see it: On Thursday, on his way to the much-ballyhooed G-20 Summit, President Trump attended the far less well known Three Seas Initiative Summit in Warsaw, Poland. While little publicized, it's the most important thing he'll do on his trip.

The Three Seas Initiative was started last year, with the idea of boosting economic cooperation among 12 countries — Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Croatia, Slovenia and Austria — most of them former Soviet satellite nations. The idea is to strengthen mutual policies on trade, infrastructure and politics. But most of all, it's about energy.

And that's where Donald Trump comes in. In addition to selling Patriot missile batteries to Poland — in large part to undo the damage of President Obama's official policy of appeasement of Putin's Russia at Eastern Europe's expense — Trump is promoting U.S. natural gas exports to the nations taking part in the Three Seas group.

In doing so, he will not only be helping the U.S. economy, he'll also be loosening Vladimir Putin's tight grip on Eastern Europe's neck.

This is important, since one of the ways Putin's Russia imposes its will on its neighbors is through its control of energy. Russia is energy rich, Eastern Europe is energy poor. Any nation that doesn't play ball can find itself suddenly with a disruption in supply — as Putin also uses his energy pipelines across Eastern Europe as an economic threat to the European Union, which depends on Russian energy.

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